The Hightower Report

Pop Goes Our Anti-Poppy Policy

Recently, I found myself humming an old Beatles song: "Poppy Fields Forever."

Okay, John Lennon's lyric was about not poppies but strawberries. However, I started humming the song because I was thinking about our country's multitrillion-dollar mission to build a viable central government and a new economy in Afghanistan. The White House and Pentagon tell us that one of the keys to success in this massive nation-building effort is to wean impoverished Afghan farmers from dependence on their only reliable moneymaking crop: poppies.

Yes, opium poppies. Afghanistan is by far the world's No. 1 producer of this drug crop, which is bought by traffickers who move it from remote Afghan villages to our streets, some 7,000 miles away. Not only are our troops defending a country that routinely fuels America's narcotics problem, but the Taliban forces that are killing and maiming our soldiers are largely financed by payments they extract from these opium traffickers.

Thus, it was good news when our officials proudly and loudly announced in September that poppy cultivation in Helmand province dropped 7% this year, thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars we've spent to persuade farmers there to switch from poppies to veggies.

But don't get too high on this progress. Nationwide, this year's production was as high as ever. Indeed, it increased by a third in Kandahar, a key province ruled by the Afghan president's own brother, who is said to be getting a piece of the action. Also, 2011 looks worse, for poppy prices have nearly tripled this year, enticing more farmers to abandon lower-paying alternative crops and return to planting the old standby.

Poppy fields might truly be forever. And that's another reason to get our troops out of there, pronto.

Name Those Nuts!

In a recent commentary, I noted that during the past three decades the Republican Party has been jerked from its historic position of mere conservatism ... to right-wingism ... to today's kooky crackpotism.

The media establishment, however, doesn't want us to notice this ideological devolution, so it's still referring to the current crop of corporate-funded, hate-the-government extremists as "conservatives." Trying to squeeze this bunch into that moderate concept is a worse fit than trying to dress a bull in a pink tutu. So I asked you, readers, to give us a more honest term for them – and you promptly generated hundreds of apt monikers!

Many of your suggestions play off the Republican brand itself, including Republicons, Republicants, Repugnicans, and Replutocrats. Others went straight to the convoluted ideological twist being propounded by the right-wing Republican mutants, offering such names as Regressives, Paleocons, Destructivists, Theocans, and Kleptocans.

Then there were entries based on the discombobulated distortions of the new know-nothings, including Confusionistas, Confabulists, Fearists, Naybobbers, Suppressionists, Munchkins of Mayhem, and the old Spiro Agnew phrase: Nattering Nabobs of Negativism. Less friendly were several labels referring to the fact that deep down, a bunch of this year's GOP stalwarts are shallow, as captured by such names as Delusionaries, AbsurdiTeaists, Ignorazzi, Moronicans, Knuckle-draggers, and Jingofunditarians.

The unabashed willingness of the candidates to front for the corporate agenda also produced vivid offerings such as Corporativists, Corpservatists, the Forked Tongues, and Scroogicans. Oooh, Scroogicans – that's even fun to say!

Good job, people. Thanks for sharing.